National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC School You Gotta Know These 20th-Century Paintings Below is a list of ten paintings which are frequent quiz bowl topics. This list focuses on individual paintings rather than bodies of work; thus, an artist like Georgia O’Keeffe is not included because no specific one of her familiar cowskull -and- flower paintings is sufficiently prominent. The list is notably skewed toward the first half of the 20th century, as only one work was painted after 1950. Perhaps the earlier paintings have simply had more time to be influential and make their way into the artistic canon. Also, many prominent post-1950 painters, like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko , do not have a specific work with a catchy title that has gained particular attention above all others; like O’Keeffe, they are known for their style and collective body of work rather than for any one painting. Guernica , by Pablo Picasso . Guernica was a Basque town bombed by the Germans during the Spanish Civil War in April 1937.

Picasso had already been commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Fair, and he completed his massive, black, white, and grey anti-war mural by early June 1937. Picasso’s Cubist approach to portraying the figures adds to the sense of destruction and chaos. Guernica was in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York until 1981, when it was returned to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Spain. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , by Marcel Duchamp . First painted in 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase created a sensation when shown at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where one critic referred to it as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” Painted in various shades of brown, Nude Descending a Staircase portrays a nude woman in a series of broken planes, capturing motion down several steps in a single image. The painting reflects a Cubist sense of division of space, and its portrait of motion echoes the work of the Futurists. The Persistence of Memory , by Salvador Dalí .

First shown in 1931, The Persistence of Memory is probably the most famous of surrealist paintings. The landscape of the scene echoes Port Lligat, Dalí’s home. The ants, flies, clocks, and the Port Lligat landscape are motifs in many other Dalí paintings, and the trompe l’oeil depiction of figures is typical of his works. It currently belongs to MOMA ; its 1951 companion piece, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory , hangs at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , by Pablo Picasso . This painting depicts five women in a brothel. However, the images of the women are partly broken into disjointed, angular facets. The degree of broken-ness is rather mild compared to later Cubist works, but it was revolutionary in 1907. The rather phallic fruit arrangement in the foreground reflects the influence of Cezanne’s “flattening of the canvas.” The two central figures face the viewer, while the other three have primitive masks as faces, reflecting another of Picasso’s influences. It is currently housed at the MOMA .

Broadway Boogie Woogie , by Piet Mondrian . While Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and other Cubist paintings represent an extension of Paul Cezanne’s division-of-space approach to the canvas, Mondrian’s De Stijl works are a still further abstraction, such that the canvas is often divided up into rectangular “tile patterns,” as in Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue . The painting simultaneously echoes the bright lights of a marquee, resembles a pattern of streets as seen from above, and creates a feeling of vitality and vibrancy, not unlike the music itself. This work can also be found at the MOMA . Campbell’s Soup Can , by Andy Warhol . Pop Art parodies (or perhaps reflects) a world in which celebrities, brand names, and media images have replaced the sacred; Warhol’s series of Campbell’s Soup paintings may be the best illustration of this. Like the object itself, the paintings were often done by the mass-produceable form of serigraphy (silk screening).

Also like the subject, the Warhol soup can painting existed in many varieties, with different types of Campbell’s Soup or numbers of cans; painting 32 or 100 or 200 identical cans further emphasized the aspect of mass production aspect in the work. The same approach underlies Warhol’s familiar series of prints of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and other pop culture figures. Nighthawks , by Edward Hopper . As is often the case with his works, Hopper uses a realistic approach (including such details as the fluorescent light of the diner, the coffee pots, and the Phillies cigar sign atop the diner) to convey a sense of a loneliness and isolation, even going so far as to depict the corner store without a door connecting to the larger world. Hopper’s wife Jo served as the model for the woman at the bar. Nighthawks is housed at the Art Institute of Chicago . I and the Village , by Marc Chagall . Painted in 1911, I and the Village is among Chagall’s earliest surviving paintings. It is a dreamlike scene that includes many motifs common to Chagall, notably the lamb and peasant life.

In addition to the two giant faces—a green face on the right and a lamb’s head on the left—other images include a milkmaid, a reaper, an upside-down peasant woman, a church, and a series of houses, some of them upside-down. I and the Village is currently housed at MOMA . Christina’s World , by Andrew Wyeth . The Christina of the title is Christina Olson, who lived near the Wyeths’ summer home in Cushing, Maine. In the 1948 painting, Christina lays in the cornfield wearing a pink dress, facing away from the viewer, her body partly twisted and hair blowing slightly in the wind. In the far distance is a three-story farmhouse with dual chimneys and two dormers, along with two sheds to its right. A distant barn is near the top middle of the painting. One notable aspect is the subtle pattern of sunlight, which strikes the farmhouse obliquely from the right, shines in the wheel tracks in the upper right, and casts very realistic-looking shadows on Christina’s dress. The Olson house was the subject of many Andrew Wyeth paintings for 30 years, and it was named to the National Register of Historic Places for its place in Christina’s World.

American Gothic , by Grant Wood . Wood painted his most famous work after a visit to Eldon, Iowa, when he saw a Carpenter Gothic style house with a distinctive Gothic window in its gable. Upon returning to his studio, he used his sister Nan and his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, as the models for the two figures. The pitchfork and the clothing were more typical of 19th-century farmers than contemporary ones. American Gothic is among the most familiar regionalist paintings, and it is said to be the most parodied of all paintings. It hangs at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was submitted for a competition by Wood upon its completion in 1930 (Wood won a bronze medal and a $300 prize). Philadelphia Museum of Art - Collections Object : Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) Additional information: Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections This painting created a sensation when it was exhibited in New York in February 1913 at the historic Armory Show of contemporary art, where perplexed Americans saw it as representing all the tricks they felt European artists were playing at their expense.

The picture's outrageousness surely lay in its seemingly mechanical portrayal of a subject at once so sensual and time-honored. The Nude's destiny as a symbol also stemmed from its remarkable aggregation of avant-garde concerns: the birth of cinema; the Cubists' fracturing of form; the Futurists' depiction of movement; the chromophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins; and the redefinitions of time and space by scientists and philosophers. The painting was bought directly from the Armory Show for three hundred dollars by a San Francisco dealer. Marcel Duchamp's great collector-friend Walter Arensberg was able to buy the work in 1927, eleven years after Duchamp had obligingly made him a hand-colored, actual-size photographic copy. Today both the copy and the original, together with a preparatory study, are owned by the Museum. Ann Temkin, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 307. Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (No.

2) sparked a storm of controversy at the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the National Guard 69th Regiment Armory in New York in 1913. The painting was perceived by the majority of art critics to be utterly unintelligible, and it soon became the butt of jokes, jingles, and caricatures. The American Art News offered a ten dollar reward to the first reader who could "find the lady"1 within the jumble of interlocking planes and jagged lines, and newspaper cartoonists had a field day with the painting, lampooning it with such titles as "The Rude Descending the Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway)" and the memorable "Explosion in a Shingle Factory." When Duchamp learned of the scandal, he was delighted, and the widespread notoriety that the painting brought him encouraged the French artist to move to New York two years later. Duchamp reduced the descending nude to a series of some twenty different static positions whose fractured volumes and linear panels fill almost the entire canvas. The faceted disintegration of the mechanized figure and the monochromatic tonality are typical of Cubist painting of the time.

However, the serial depiction of movement goes beyond Cubism in its attempt to map the motion and energy of the body as it passes through space. Duchamp's interest in plotting the static phases of a moving subject has often been compared to the work of the Italian Futurists, who were obsessed with notions of velocity. Another precedent for the work can be found in the time-lapse photography of Étienne-Jules Marey in France and Eadweard Muybridge and Thomas Eakins in the United States. Muybridge's book Animal Locomotion, of 1887, which included a sequence of twenty-four images of a naked woman descending a flight of stairs, possibly served as a source for Duchamp s landmark painting. Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2000), p. 27. Note: 1) American Art News, vol. 11, no. 21 (March 1, 1913), p. 3, and vol. 11, no. 22 (March 8, 1913), p. 3. * Works in the collection are moved off view for many different reasons.

Although gallery locations on the website are updated regularly, there is no guarantee that this object will be on display on the day of your visit. Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art Works of Art (4) Essay Embodying the intellect of his literary contemporaries Marcel Proust and James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) has been aptly described by the painter Willem de Kooning as a one-man movement. Jasper Johns has written of his work as the “field where language, thought and vision act on one another.” Duchamp has had a huge impact on twentieth-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted, he said, “to put art back in the service of the mind.” Born in Normandy in northern France, Duchamp traveled back and forth between Europe and the United States for much of his life.

His initial foray into modern art followed the trends of his contemporaries, with his first paintings in the mode of Cézanne and the Impressionists , while after 1910 his work reflects a shift toward Cubism . One of his most important works, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art) (a second version of a work on cardboard from 1911), however, reflects Duchamp’s ambivalent relationship with Cubism. He adopts the limited palette of Cubist paintings, but his invigorated figure is in a state of perpetual motion—a very different effect from Picasso and Braque’s Analytic Cubism that held figures tightly in place. Provoking negative reactions from even the Parisian avant-garde, the painting was rejected by the Salon des Indépendants for both its title and the artist’s mechanistic, dehumanizing rendering of the female nude. The following year, it sparked controversy at the New York Armory Show, helping to establish Duchamp’s reputation as a provocateur overseas and paving the way for his arrival in New York two years later.

Subverting traditional or accepted modes of artistic production with irony and satire is a hallmark of Duchamp’s legendary career. His most striking, iconoclastic gesture, the readymade, is arguably the century’s most influential development on artists’ creative process. Duchamp, however, did not perceive his work with readymade objects as such a radical experiment, in part because he viewed paint as an industrially made product, and hence painting as an “assisted-readymade.” Moreover, he had already begun to incorporate chance operations into his practice—for example, with 3 Standard Stoppages (1913–14)—and thus had already begun to surrender artistic control and empower other factors to determine the character of a work of art. With Bicycle Wheel (1913), the first readymade, Duchamp moved toward a creative process that was antithetical to artistic skill. He wanted to distance himself from traditional modes of painting in an effort to emphasize the conceptual value of a work of art, seducing the viewer through irony and verbal witticisms rather than relying on technical or aesthetic appeal. The object became a work of art because the artist had decided it would be designated as such.

Bicycle Wheel consisted of a fork and the wheel of a common bicycle that rested upon an ordinary stool. The mundane, mass-produced, everyday nature of these objects is precisely why Duchamp chose them (later works would include a snow shovel, a urinal (Philadelphia Museum of Art), and a bottlerack (Philadelphia Museum of Art), to name a few). As a result, he ensured that the fruits of modern industrial life would be a fertile resource in the production of works of art. Naturally, Duchamp’s iconoclasm appealed to the vehemently untraditional and bitingly critical nature of the Dada movement. His work can easily be understood as a forerunner to this revolutionary sensibility, which actively sought to undermine the reigning values of conservatism that governed Europe and that perpetuated the devastating reality of World War I. Duchamp’s own experience with Dada, however, occurred while he lived in New York, in the circle of Francis Picabia, a Franco-Cuban artist and writer, and the American painter and photographer Man Ray , as well as the American collectors Katherine Dreier and Louise and Walter Arensberg. The nature of New York Dada was less overtly political than its European strain.

Instead, satirical works such as Duchamp’s readymade Fountain (1917) tested the limits of public taste and the boundaries of artistic technique. By pushing and ultimately transgressing such boundaries within the art world, Duchamp’s works reflected the artist’s sensibility. His use of irony, puns, alliteration, and paradox layered the works with humor while still enabling him to comment on the dominant political and economic systems of his time. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23, Philadelphia Museum of Art), also known as The Large Glass, can be seen as summarizing Duchamp’s view that painting and sculpture were fundamentally incompatible and inadequate as art forms with which to render and reflect contemporary cultural life. His extensive preparatory drawings, writings, and studies for The Large Glass (many of which are contained in The Green Box of 1934) indicate his development away from realistic representations of forms to a more abstracted, mathematical mode of connoting the real world. His artistic evolution must therefore be understood as an assault on traditional artistic practices and a desire to accommodate a modern-day fascination with industrial processes and products.

Although in the 1920s, Duchamp famously renounced artmaking in favor of playing chess for the remainder of his life, he never fully retreated from his quintessential role as artist-provocateur. Duchamp is associated with many artistic movements, from Cubism to Dada to Surrealism , and paved the way for later styles such as Pop (Andy Warhol), Minimalism (Robert Morris), and Conceptualism (Sol LeWitt). A prolific artist, his greatest contribution to the history of art lies in his ability to question, admonish, critique, and playfully ridicule existing norms in order to transcend the status quo—he effectively sanctioned the role of the artist to do just that. Nan Rosenthal Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art October 2004 Citation Rosenthal, Nan. “Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968).” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004) Further Reading Lebel, Robert. Marcel Duchamp. New York: Grove Press, 1959. Schwarz, Arturo.

The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp 2 vols. 3d rev. ed. New York: Delano Greenridge Editions, 1997. Tomkins, Calvin. Duchamp: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Additional Essays by Nan Rosenthal Rosenthal, Nan. “ Jasper Johns (born 1930) .” (October 2004) Related Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 - Duchamp, Marcel - Gallery - Web gallery of art Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 Description: Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 Oil on canvas, 1912 147 cm × 89.2 cm (57 7⁄8 in × 35 1⁄8 in) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (French: Nu descendant un escalier n° 2) is a 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp.

The work is widely regarded as a Modernist classic and has become one of the most famous of its time. In its first presentation at the Parisian Salon des Indépendants, it was rejected by the Cubists and caused a huge stir during its exhibition at the 1913 Armory Show in New York following a press copy of an abuse scandal. The work is now found in permanent exhibition at the Louis and Walter Arensberg Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia. The work, an oil painting on canvas with dimensions of 147 cm × 89.2 cm (57.9 in × 35.1 in) in portrait, seemingly depicts a figure demonstrating an abstract movement in its ochres and browns. The discernable "body parts" of the figure are composed of nested, conical and cylindrical abstract elements, assembled together in such a way as to suggest rhythm and convey the movement of the figure merging into itself. Dark outlines limit the contours of the body while serving as motion lines that emphasize the dynamics of the moving figure, while the accented arcs of the dotted lines seem to suggest a thrusting pelvic motion.

The movement seems to be rotated counter-clockwise from the upper left to the lower right corner to move, where the gradient of the apparently frozen sequence corresponding to the bottom right to top left dark, respectively, becomes more transparent, the fading of which is apparently intended to simulate the "older" section. At the edges of the picture, the steps which are indicated in darker colors. The middle of the image is an amalgam of light and dark, that becomes more piqued as one approaches the edges. The overall warm, monochrome bright palette of the painting ranges from yellow ocher, to dark, almost black tones. The colors are translucent applied. At the bottom left of the painting Duchamp placed as title, "NU DESCENDANT UN ESCALIER" in block letters, which may or may not be related to the work, as the question of whether the figure represents a human body remains open; the figure viewers infer gives little clue to its age, individuality, character, or sex (though the work's title has the masculine gender). he painting combines elements of both the Cubist and Futurist movements. In the composition, Duchamp depicts motion by successive superimposed images, similar to stroboscopic motion photography.

Duchamp also recognized the influence of the stop-motion photography of Étienne-Jules Marey, particularly Muybridge's Woman Walking Downstairs from his 1887 picture series, published as The Human Figure in Motion. Duchamp first submitted the work to appear in a Cubist show at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris, but jurist Albert Gleizes asked Duchamp's brothers, Jacques Villon and Raymond Duchamp-Villon, to have him voluntarily withdraw the painting, or paint over the title that he had painted on the work and rename it something else. The hanging committee objected to the work on the grounds that it had "too much of a literary title", and that "a nude never descends the stairs—a nude reclines". Of the incident Duchamp recalled, I said nothing to my brothers. But I went immediately to the show and took my painting home in a taxi. It was really a turning point in my life, I can assure you. I saw that I would not be very much interested in groups after that. He submitted the painting to the 1913 Armory Show in New York City located where Americans, accustomed to naturalistic art, were scandalized.

Julian Street, an art critic for the New York Times wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory," and cartoonists satirized the piece. It spawned dozens of parodies in the years that followed. After attending the Armory Show and seeing Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote (using his own, also valid translation): "Take the picture which for some reason is called 'A Naked Man Going Down Stairs'. There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, 'A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder', the name would fit the facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the 'Naked Man Going Down Stairs'.

From the standpoint of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture." Hits: Marcel Duchamp | Biography & Artwork | Britannica.com Arthur B. Davies Marcel Duchamp, in full Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (born July 28, 1887, Blainville, France —died October 2, 1968, Neuilly), French artist who broke down the boundaries between works of art and everyday objects. After the sensation caused by Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), he painted few other pictures. His irreverence for conventional aesthetic standards led him to devise his famous ready-mades and heralded an artistic revolution. Duchamp was friendly with the Dadaists , and in the 1930s he helped to organize Surrealist exhibitions. He became a U.S. citizen in 1955. Marcel Duchamp. George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

(Digital File Number: cph 3b10889 Early years Although Duchamp’s father was a notary the family had an artistic tradition stemming from his grandfather, a shipping agent who practiced engraving seriously. Four of the six Duchamp children became artists. Gaston, born in 1875, was later known as Jacques Villon , and Raymond , born in 1876, called himself Duchamp-Villon. Marcel, the youngest of the boys, and his sister Suzanne, born in 1889, both kept the name Duchamp as artists. When Marcel arrived in Paris in October 1904, his two elder brothers were already in a position to help him. He had done some painting at home, and his Portrait of Marcel Lefrançois shows him already in possession of a style and of a technique. During the next few years, while drawing cartoons for comic magazines, Duchamp passed rapidly through the main contemporary trends in painting— Post-Impressionism , the influence of Paul Cézanne , Fauvism , and finally Cubism . He was merely experimenting, seeing no virtue in making a habit of any one style.

He was outside artistic tradition not only in shunning repetition but also in not attempting a prolific output or frequent exhibition of his work. In the Fauvist style Marcel painted some of his best early work three or four years after the Fauvist movement itself had died away. The Portrait of the Artist’s Father is a notable example. Only in 1911 did he begin to paint in a manner that showed a trace of Cubism. He had then become a friend of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire , a strong supporter of Cubism and of everything avant-garde in the arts. Another of his close friends was Francis Picabia , himself a painter in the most orthodox style of Impressionism until 1909, when he felt the need of complete change. Duchamp shared with him the feeling that Cubism was too systematic, too static and “boring.” They both passed directly from “semirealism” to a “nonobjective” expression of movement. There they met “ Futurism ” and “Abstractionism,” which they had known before only by name. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros.

Folds Its Tent To an exhibition in 1911 Duchamp sent Portrait (Dulcinea), which was composed of a series of five almost monochromatic, superimposed silhouettes. In this juxtaposition of successive phases of the movement of a single body appears the idea for the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 . The main difference between the two works is that in the earlier one the kangaroo -like silhouettes can be distinguished. In the Nude, on the other hand, there is no nude at all but only a descending machine, a nonobjective and virtually cinematic effect that was entirely new in painting. When the Nude was brought to the 28th Salon des Indépendants in February 1912, the committee, composed of friends of the Duchamp family, refused to hang the painting. These men were not reactionaries and were well accustomed to Cubism, yet they were unable to accept the novel vision. A year later at the Armory Show in New York City , the painting again was singled out from among hundreds that were equally shocking to the public.

Whatever it was that made the work so scandalous in Paris, and in New York so tremendous a success, prompted Duchamp to stop painting at the age of 25. A widely held belief is that Duchamp introduced in his work a dimension of irony , almost a mockery of painting itself, that was more than anyone could bear and that undermined his own belief in painting. The title alone was a joke that was resented. Even the Cubists did their best to flatter the eye, but Duchamp’s only motive seemed to be provocation. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, oil on canvas by Marcel Duchamp, … © Philadelphia Museum of Art/Corbis Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies There was no question that as a painter Duchamp was on a footing with the most gifted. What he lacked was faith in art itself, and he sought to replace aesthetic values in his new world with an aggressive intellectualism opposed to the so-called common-sense world. As early as 1913 he began studies for an utterly awkward piece: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass).

For it, he repudiated entirely what he called retinal art and adopted the geometrical methods of industrial design. It became like the blueprint of a machine, albeit a symbolic one, that embodied his ideas of man, woman, and love. Like the Nude, The Large Glass was to be unique among works of modern painting. Between 1913 and 1923, Duchamp worked almost exclusively on the preliminary studies and the actual painting of the picture itself. His farewell to painting was by no means a farewell to work. During this period a stroke of genius led him to a discovery of great importance in contemporary art, the so-called ready-made . In 1913 he produced the Bicycle Wheel , which was simply an ordinary bicycle wheel. In 1914 Pharmacy consisted of a commercial print of a winter landscape, to which he added two small figures reminiscent of pharmacists’ bottles. It was nearly 40 years before the ready-mades were seen as more than a derisive gesture against the excessive importance attached to works of art, before their positive values were understood. With the ready-mades, contemporary art became in itself a mixture of creation and criticism .

When World War I broke out, Duchamp, who was exempt from military service, was living and working in almost complete isolation. He left France for the United States , where he had made friends through the Armory Show. When he landed in New York in June 1915, he was welcomed by reporters as a famous man. His warm reception in intellectual circles as well raised his spirits. The wealthy poet and collector Walter Arensberg arranged a studio for him in his own home, where the painter immediately set to work on The Large Glass. He became the centre of the Arensberg group, enjoying a reputation that led to many offers from art galleries eager to handle the works of the painter of the Nude. He refused them all, however, not wanting to start a full-time career as a painter. To support himself, he gave French lessons. He was then, and remained, an artist whose works would have been sought after but who was content to distribute them free among his friends or to sell them for intentionally small amounts. He helped Arensberg buy back as many of his works as could be found, including the Nude. They became a feature of the Arensberg Collection, which was left to the Philadelphia Museum of Art .

Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Besides The Large Glass, on which he worked for eight more years until abandoning it in 1923, Duchamp did only a few more ready-mades. One, a urinal titled Fountain , he sent to the first exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, in 1917. Although he was a founder-member of this society, he had signed the work “R. Mutt,” and therefore it was refused. His ready-mades had anticipated by a few years the Dada movement, which Picabia introduced to New York City in the magazine 291 (1917). As an echo of the movement, Duchamp helped Arensberg and H.P. Roché to publish The Blind Man, which had only two issues, and Rongwrong, which had only one. Later, with the artist Man Ray , he published a single issue of New York Dada in 1921. Fountain, ready-made by Marcel Duchamp, replica of the 1917 original … art@aditi In 1918 he sold The Large Glass, which was still unfinished, to Walter Arensberg.

With the money from this and another painting, his last, he spent nine months in Buenos Aires , where he heard of the armistice and of the deaths of his brother Raymond Duchamp-Villon and of Apollinaire. In Paris in 1919 he stayed with Picabia and established contact with the first Dada group. This was the occasion of his most famous ready-made, a photograph of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and a goatee added. The act expressed the Dadaists’ scorn for the art of the past, which in their eyes was part of the infamy of a civilization that had produced the horrors of the war just ended. Trending Topics Eyjafjallajökull volcano In February 1923 Duchamp stopped working on The Large Glass, considering it definitely and permanently unfinished. As the years passed, art activity of any kind interested him less and less, but the cinema came to fulfill his pleasure in movement. His works to this point had been only potential machines, and it was time for him to create machines that were real, that worked and moved. The first ones were devoted to optics and led to a short film, Anemic Cinema (1926).

With these and other products, including “optical phonograph records,” he acted as a kind of amateur engineer. The modesty of his results, however, was a way by which he could ridicule the ambitions of industry. The rest of the time he was absorbed in chess playing, even taking part in international tournaments and publishing a treatise on the subject in 1932. Although Duchamp carefully avoided art circles, he remained in contact with the Surrealist group in Paris, composed of many of his former Dadaist friends. When in 1934 he published the Green Box, containing a series of documents related to The Large Glass, the Surrealist poet André Breton perceived the importance of the painting and wrote the first comprehensive study of Duchamp, which appeared in the Paris magazine Minotaure in 1935. From that time on there was a closer association between the Surrealists and Duchamp, who helped Breton to organize all the Surrealist exhibitions from 1938 to 1959. Just before World War II he assembled his Boîte-en-valise, a suitcase containing 68 small-scale reproductions of his works.

When the Nazis occupied France, he smuggled his material across the border in the course of several trips. Eventually he carried it to New York City , where he joined a number of the Surrealists in exile, including Breton, Max Ernst , and Yves Tanguy . He was instrumental in organizing the Surrealist exhibition in New York City in October and November of 1942. Unlike his co-exiles, he felt at home in America, where he had many friends. During the war, the exhibition of The Large Glass at the Museum of Modern Art , New York City, helped to revive his reputation, and a special issue of the art magazine View was devoted to him in 1945. Two years later he was back in Paris assisting Breton with a Surrealist exhibition, but he returned to New York City promptly and spent most of the remainder of his life there. After his marriage to Teeny Sattler in 1954, he lived more than ever in semiretirement, content with chess and with producing, as the spirit moved him, some strange and unexpected object.

This contemplative life was interrupted in about 1960, when the rising generation of American artists realized that Duchamp had found answers for many of their problems. Suddenly tributes came to him from all over the world. Retrospective shows of his works were organized in America and Europe. Even more astonishing were the replicas of his ready-mades produced in limited editions with his permission, but the greatest surprise was still to come. After his death in Neuilly his friends heard that he had worked secretly for his last 20 years on a major piece called Étant donnés: 1. la chute d’eau, 2. le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas). It is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and offers through two small holes in a heavy wooden door a glimpse of Duchamp’s enigma . Assessment As artist and anti-artist, Marcel Duchamp is considered one of the leading spirits of 20th-century painting. With the exception of the Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, however, his works were ignored by the public for the greater part of his life.

Until 1960 only such avant-garde groups as the Surrealists claimed that he was important, while to “official” art circles and sophisticated critics he appeared to be merely an eccentric and something of a failure. He was more than 70 years old when he emerged in the United States as the secret master whose entirely new attitude toward art and society, far from being negative or nihilistic, had led the way to Pop art , Op art , and many of the other movements embraced by younger artists everywhere. Not only did he change the visual arts, but he also changed the mind of the artist. Marcel Duchamp | artnet Marcel Duchamp × Biography Marcel Duchamp was one of the most important artists of the 20th century, a painter and sculptor who is both a key figure in Cubism and one of the forefathers of Conceptual Art. His iconic “readymades” include Fountain (1917), an otherwise unremarkable porcelain urinal mysteriously signed “R. Mutt.” Initially scorned by critics, this work had a singularly enormous influence on contemporaneous artists and forever altered what was possible in art.

Born on July 28, 1887, in Blainville-Crevon, France, he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1904 to 1905. He began hosting informal salons with his brothers in 1911, inviting artists such as Francis Picabia , Robert Delaunay , and Roger de la Fresnaye . Together, the group became known as the Section d’Or. One of Duchamp’s most famous works is the landmark Cubist painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), which scandalized audiences used to traditionally representational art when exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. Over time, Duchamp became less interested in what he called “retinal art” and more interested in the “art of the mind,” delving into a practice that was forever witty, inventive, and challenging. He died on October 2, 1968, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France at the age of 81. Related Categories Infamy and Influence | Cleveland Museum of Art Infamy and Influence Indra K.

Lacis Curatorial Research Assistant Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) 1912. Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887–1968). Oil on canvas; 147 x 89.2 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950-134-59. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Estate of Marcel Duchamp Marcel Duchamp’s iconic masterpiece Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) played a crucial role in spreading European modernism across the United States. A clear view of the painting was nearly impossible during its debut at the New York Armory Show of 1913 as crowds constantly surrounded this peculiar “abstraction.” Boldly breaking with tradition, Duchamp depicted a nude, mechanical-looking figure descending the stairs instead of reclining or lying down as convention dictated. Rendered in brown, black, and beige tones, the skeletal, insect-like figure of ambiguous gender barely resembled typical human contours, an artistic transgression that at the time was considered not just visually confusing, but also an affront to American morals and rules of social decorum.

Although the notoriety of this mechanical nude would precede Duchamp’s personal reputation throughout the early decades of his career, its initial reception was one of bewilderment and outrage. Ridiculed by critics and the public alike, the painting was skewered in the press as “an explosion in a shingle factory” and Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway). (2) Deftly mixing artistic styles, Duchamp’s painting summarized many of modern art’s concerns: the monochromatic tonalities of splintered Cubist forms, the Futurists’ portrayal of bodies in motion, cinematic freeze frames, growing interest in the space-time continuum, and experiments with time-lapse photography by Étienne-Jules Marey, Eadweard Muybridge, and Thomas Eakins. The difficulty of classifying this enigmatic work only increased its infamy, with some critics comparing its je ne sais quoi with the mysterious intrigue of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. (3) Nude Descending a Staircase had a troubled history even before it arrived in New York.

In the spring of 1912 it was rejected from the Paris Salon des Indépendants by a jury that included the artist’s two brothers and their friends—a painful blow for Duchamp, then only 25 years old. When the painting was exhibited at the Armory a year later, the magazine Art News offered a $10 prize to anyone who could “find the lady,” claiming it would be nearly impossible to discern either a figure or staircase. (4) Readers’ responses published the following week ran the gamut. Some suggested the figure might be male or that the painting should be turned upside down; others accused Duchamp of having defective eyesight or an inability to record accurate impressions, or of simply seeking notoriety. Portrait multiple de Marcel Duchamp (Five-Way Portrait of Marcel Duchamp) 1917. Unidentified photographer. Gelatin silver print. Private collection. Image courtesy Francis M. Naumann Fine Art, New York Such suspicions about Duchamp’s iconoclastic leanings were not entirely incorrect.

Nude Descending a Staircase was, in fact, the artist’s first attempt at liberating art from the realm of the purely retinal or visual and returning it to the conceptual and cerebral faculties of the mind. The same year the painting was exhibited in New York, Duchamp created his first “readymade” by mounting a bicycle wheel on a kitchen stool. In the following decades, such works as Bicycle Wheel and Bottle Rack—sculptures that are exactly what their titles describe—altered the course of 20th-century art by calling into question time-honored qualities of originality and craftsmanship. By selecting everyday objects and altering them only minimally, Duchamp rejected the preciousness of individually hand-crafted art in exchange for reproducible works that represented a novel, one-of-a-kind idea. Known to reproduce his own originals, Duchamp is widely credited with introducing three-dimensional multiples into the art market. Three years after Nude Descending a Staircase was purchased by San Francisco art dealer Frederic Torrey for $324 at the close of the Armory exhibition, Duchamp made an exact, full-scale reproduction of the work, which he titled Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 3).

(5) Created by superimposing ink, colored pencil, and paint onto a large photograph of the original, Duchamp’s copy was acquired by the artist’s most important patrons, Walter and Louise Arensberg. This opportunity for the Cleveland Museum of Art to display Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) dovetails dynamically with the museum’s relationship to both the painting and the artist. In August 1936, Duchamp was returning home after visiting the Arensbergs in Hollywood when he stopped by the Cleveland Museum of Art to view Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), his most important and best known oil painting (which he had not seen in 13 years), at the time on loan to the museum for an exhibition commemorating its 20th anniversary. To Duchamp’s delight, a misreading of the abbreviation “ex” as “expired” instead of “exhibition” led to the listing of Duchamp as dead by 1933 in the catalogue; according to the Plain Dealer, however, Duchamp was “immensely entertained” by the misprint.

(6) During his daylong visit to the museum, Duchamp made a series of notes about the painting, descriptions that helped guide the hundreds of small replicas he would subsequently produce not only of this painting but of many of his most important works—faithful miniature replicas that he would ultimately assemble to create his portable “museum in a box.” (7) Titled From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy, Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise contains small watercolors, scale models, cutouts, and prints cataloguing his life’s work, including Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2). The Cleveland Museum of Art acquired a box from this series in 2007, which—along with other works by Duchamp’s colleagues in the Dada and Surrealist movements—will be on display alongside this notorious painting when it returns to Cleveland on April 9 for the museum’s centennial celebration. Once referred to as “the only painter to awaken an entire continent to a new art,” Duchamp’s succès de scandale in New York continues to remain a key aspect of his artistic identity more than 100 years later.

(8) Contemporary artists, including Joseph Kosuth, Sherri Levine, Mike Bidlo, Larry Rivers, and Kira O’Reilly, have produced paintings, sculptures, and performances that appropriate and reinterpret this famous painting. (9) During O’Reilly’s 2009 performance Stair Falling at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, for example, the artist painstakingly tumbled down a set of stairs completely nude and in slow motion over the course of several hours, creating an entirely new work while also abstracting and reconfiguring Duchamp’s desire to depict movement. While many artists might consider such gestures an affront to the legacy of their work, Duchamp, whohas been described as a “one-man movement,” would surely have been thrilled to know that the reputation of his infamous painting encompasses not just one but many incarnations. (10) From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy 1935–40, 1963–66 (series F). Marcel Duchamp.

Red leather box containing 80 objects (collotypes; letterpress, pochoir, and lithographic prints); gouache, green lacquer, varnish, celluloid, wood; objects of glass, oilcloth, and ceramic; 41.5 x 38.5 x 9.9 cm overall. Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund 2007.157. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Question: 'Nude Descending A Staircase' is perhaps the most famous painting by which 20th century artist?
Answer: MARCEL DUCHAMP